vii The Millennium Development Goals and Conservation: Summary

Document begins: vii The Millennium Development Goals and Conservation: Summary 1. LINKING CONSERVATION AND POVERTY REDUCTION The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set 48 targets, to be achieved by 2015. Four years after the Millennium Declaration ­ from which the MDGs are derived ­ the United Nations has reported significant progress in many regions of the world and against many of the targets. Progress in some regions of the world ­ particularly in sub-Saharan Africa ­ and against some of the targets ­ child and maternal mortality and access to improved sanitation ­ has been slow however, and in some cases is worsening. Getting back on track and making progress world- wide against the full set of goals and targets by 2015 is clearly going to require significant extra effort, from conventional and viii non-conventional sources. Can conservation play a role in y this effort? Despite the close interlinkages between conservation and Summar poverty reduction there is still considerable polarisation between the conservation and development communities. On the one hand, because the goods and services generated by natural resources are generally unaccounted for in national statistics, development agencies have often undervalued the potential role they can play in poverty reduction ­ ...